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ROYAL PALM BEACH — Village council members weren’t encouraged to voice their opinions at last night’s citizens summit, the town hall-like meeting that gave residents a chance to have their say on the village’s short and long term goals.

“The council has to have big ears and little mouths tonight,” Lyle Sumek, the Palm Coast consultant who ran the two-hour meeting, said. “It’s all about the residents and listening to their ideas.”

OK, that was yesterday. Today, I was curious to find out how the council thought the meeting went. All council members were present, except for Fred Pinto, who said he had an emergency business meeting in Coral Springs he couldn’t avoid.

Richard Valuntas said he was pleased with the turnout — about 35 people attended — but would’ve like to have seen more residents. Close to 50 people came to last year’s summit.

He said many residents were concerned about the village focusing too much time on Commons Park and neglecting the other parks.

“They don’t want to see the quality of those other parks go down,” Valuntas said.

Schools were also a big issue.

“But that’s out of our realm,” Valuntas said.

The big takeaway, however, was that it’s time to hear fresh ideas from residents who don’t normally attend meetings. After all, many of those who came last night were invited by council members and are members of various advisory boards.

The result: You get the same cast of characters basically offering the same ideas.

“I’m surprised the council and the residents are pretty much on the same page,” David Swift said. “That’s valuable information for us. But it would be nice to have people who disagree with me.”

Swift said he would also like to see the village reaching out to younger residents who are 40 and under to encourage them to attend these summits and future council meetings.

“We have to find some younger folks,” he said. “We haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”

Jeff Hmara said getting new people involved gives the council a better sense of what residents really want.

“We reach out to people who are engaged because we know they’ll show up,” Hmara said. “But I want to reach out to people who haven’t been involved. If we keep pushing, we’ll get new people involved and get them interested.”

While walking around, Mayor Matty Mattioli said he was seeing the same things listed at each table — residents love Commons Park, they like the new Aldi distribution center that’s being built and they’re concerned about increased traffic.

“It’s good to see people expressing their opinions,” Mattioli said. “But the same people who were interested last year, were interested this year.”